Jazz Finland Live

Espoo Big Band feat. Jukka Eskola & Kalevi Louhivuori celebrate Gil Evans' 110 anniversary playing his arrangements.

Open event

Tickets 32,50 €

Rajaton Jazz Festival was born in 2007 as a regular jazz concert, which got so successful that it was decided to organize it the following year. The concert series became a tradition and grew into an entire festival. The festival is a versatile event with unlimited musical style and its main idea has been to invite the best international jazz musicians.

One important principle of the festival is the presentation of creative art and the attempt to encourage musicians to perform their own style. During the 15 years of the event, bands and musicians from Germany, Estonia, Russia, Norway and other countries have performed at the festival. This year, the focus is on Finnish bands with international performers and a unique program.

Rajaton Jazz Festival's final concert on 27 October will feature atmospheric jazz, swing and ballads performed by Niki's Four Jazz Quartet and the delightful Anastasia Trisna. There will be an interesting and varied selection of songs, many of which are established jazz standards, as well as some of the rarest tunes.

Anastasia Trizna & NIKI'S FOUR JAZZ QUARTET
Anastasia Trizna, vocals
Valeri Nikitin, piano
Simo Pinomaa, tenor and soprano saxophone
Shane MacKenzie, bass guitar
Markku Mäntymaa, drums

Anastasia Trizna is a talented performer who works in a number of theaters, music projects, and film and television productions. Anastasia has been a guest singer at jazz concerts and festivals around Finland, collaborating with many distinguished Finnish jazz musicians.

Valeri Nikitin is known as a jazz pianist, music arranger, viola player, composer and teacher. During his long and successful career, Valeri Nikitin has taken part in various music projects, collaborated with many musicians and music producers. He's made a great contribution to modern jazz culture. Valeri is a founder and honorary participant of the Helsinki Rajaton Jazz Festival.

Trizna and Nikitin have been performing jazz together since 2012 and it was clear from the start that it was natural to produce music together. Their style is characterized by sensitivity and presence.

Markku Mäntymaa started playing drums as a young boy, which in the early 90's turned into a career when he graduated from the Musicians institute in Hollywood. His career continued in numerous bands and orchestras.

Shane MacKenzie has also played music professionally since the early 90s. In Helsinki, he is known as a versatile player in several ensembles, concerts and festivals.

Simo Pinomaa is a Helsinki-based saxophonist who has played in bands such as Ladies & Gents, Mosabacka Big Band and several jazz bands.

Open event

UMO Helsinki Jazz Orchestra does the tango – both Argentinian and Finnish – directed by its Artistic Partner, the Argentinian-born Guillermo Klein. Completely new program will feature new arrangements of beloved tango classics such as El Choclo (Tulisuudelma), Tango Desirée, Silencio and Jalousie (Mustasukkaisuutta).

Guillermo Klein, Diego Schissi, Juan Pablo Navarro and Richard Nant, who are responsible for the big band versions of traditional Argentinean and Finnish tango pieces, bring more Latin American colour to the program, while Finnish arrangers Kari Ikonen and Frank Carlberg have penned the Argentinean tango arrangements to be heard in this concert. Guillermo Klein conducts the concert.

Composer, pianist and conductor Guillermo Klein (b. 1969) is UMO Helsinki Jazz Orchestra’s Artistic Partner. A true world citizen, Klein was born in Argentina’s Buenos Aires, trained in the United States and is currently based in New York. He also has a versatile musical background where classical education meets rock and a degree in jazz is complemented by Latino influences. In addition to leading his own group, Los Guachos, Klein’s CV is adorned with collaborative projects with a number of notable orchestras, including hr-Bigband and the Metropole Orchestra.

Guillermo Klein’s visit is part of the international Jazz Finland Residency in Helsinki launched by the Finnish Jazz Federation, Sibelius Academy Jazz Music Department at Uniarts Helsinki, UMO Helsinki Jazz Orchestra and the Finnish Musicians’ Union. The Residence, coordinated and managed by the Jazz Federation, annually invites two international artist guests to Finland for a period of 1–2 months. The residency program includes holding master classes at Sibelius Academy and performing together with UMO. The residence’s partners are also Music Finland, Finnish Jazz Musicians association and the HIAP Helsinki International Artist Programme. www.jazzfinlandresidency.fi

Duration 75 minutes, no intermission.

Did you know that the word ‘tango’ is Latin and means ‘I touch’? Tango’s roots are in Latin America where the musical genre developed hand in hand with the dance. Tango arrived in Finland with a bang in 1913, and in the following years Finns not only adopted it but made it their own. The second coming of tango took place in the 1960s, and this time Finns’ tango fever reached almost hysterical proportions. Still today Finland has a passionate relationship with tango, and both the musical genre and the dance style have become a part of our culture and identity.

”Pianist-composer Guillemo Klein merges clockwork intricacy with guileless emotion in Los Guachos… On Cristal, they embrace Klein’s kaleidoscopic take on the tangos he grew up with in Argentina – music charged with deep feeling and deceptive formality.” Nate Chinen, WBGO

”Mr. Klein’s home country courses through everything he writes, but he resists letting his music be pinned to a single influence or nationality.” Giovanni Russonello, The New York Times

Open event

Tickets €15/€10

The sextet led by Valtteri Laurell Pöyhönen is known as an excellent and boundary-breaking live band. Their latest album Dark Money is full of influences, e.g. from the production of Miles Davis in the early 1970s, the raw live energy of Charles Mingus' bands and the space jazz of Sun Ra.

Open event

Free entry

Kaje and Mikko Hassinen take the listener on a journey to the electroacoustic sound world.

At the beginning of the evening Hassinen will talk about his own work and the use of electronics as part of his career as a percussionist. Mikko Hassinen is much more than a jazz drummer: he is also a composer of acoustic and electronic music, a conductor and a producer of jazz and classical music.

Kaje is a duo consisting of baroque instrument violone (Lassi Kari) and live electronics and synthesizer (Juuso Kontiola). This duo, which might be the first duo in the world to combine these instruments, learns about the possibilities of live electronics and sound synthesis as an extension of the violone's sound world in both composed and improvised music.

At the end of the evening, Hassinen, Kari and Kontiola perform together.

Open event